Information technology is now routinely used by many enterprises to receive, process, and provide information via widely accessible electronic communications networks, such as the Internet. Yet most information technology systems will begin to deny service, or fail to process message traffic efficiently, when communications traffic exceeds a processing capacity of the system. Such failures in communication can significantly impair the operations of an enterprise in many ways. Slower website performance is also known to cause users/visitors to leave the website sooner. Another consequence of poor performance is that the website may be downgraded in search engine results rankings.
In recent years, enterprises and developers have sought an easy and affordable way to use cloud computing as a way to load and performance test their web-based applications. Cloud computing gets its name from the fact that the machine, storage, and application resources exist on a “cloud” of servers. In cloud computing shared resources, software and information are provided on-demand, like a public utility, via the Internet. Cloud computing is closely related to grid computing, which refers to the concept of interconnecting networked computers such that processing power, memory and data storage are all community resources that authorized users can utilize for specific tasks.
Load testing a web-based application or website can involve simulating a very large number (e.g., up to or beyond 1,000,000) of virtual website users via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or HTTP Secure (HTTPS) message intercommunications with the target website. For very large tests, sending and aggregating the test results data generated from all of the load servers to a database available to a dashboard in real-time has been problematic. The huge overhead of receiving and processing a very large number of HTTP messages containing all of the requests and responses sent from each of the many load servers to the analytic servers responsible for analyzing the test results data can easily overwhelm the resources of the server. In addition, communications bottlenecks can occur wherein messages get queued, such that the test result's are no longer sent to the database in real-time, and therefore are not available in the dashboards in real-time.
In extreme cases, the load test servers can also back up, causing them to not generate the appropriate load on the customers' websites or web applications. Adding to the problem is the fact that some calculations, such as standard deviation, cannot easily be calculated at each server and then added up or totaled with the same calculations performed on other servers to form a unified result for the entire set of servers generating the load test.